Published: February 1986

Edition read : Target first, 1986- the first ten pages of which haven’t been cut properly and have a bit which sticks out

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter fuses the three elements nicely so they all look better than they did on screen.

The TARDIS dematerialises..."with its usual wheezing, groaning sound"

Childhood Recollections: My hardback of this is signed by Richard Franklin.

Ramblings: If in 1972 somebody had decided to make a film based on Doctor Who as it was being produced at the time, what they would have ended up with would have been something more or less like ‘The Time Monster’. It’s got a truly cinematic combination of elements- all the UNIT regulars are there, as is the Master; you also have a present day setting giving way to the legendary past , one of those neat little "Doctor Who explains" plots, classical mythology rationalised in the Doctor Who universe and a turn by a glamorous guest star. The formula worked pretty well for the Star Trek films, but over six episodes of television it perhaps isn’t quite such a good idea- and so the story has never had the best of reputations, becoming the penultimate story from the Third Doctor’s era to be adapted in Terrance Dicks’s final sweep-up of the stories with which he’d been personally involved and whose original authors were either unable or unwilling to adapt themselves.

It’s simplistic but true to say that this book, then, is Terrance Dicks doing what he does best- tidying up the story, tightening things up and putting the breaks in the right places. Having said that, he does rather cheekily tie the TOMTIT machine to the Timescoop from ‘The Five Doctors’. But on the other hand, it’s done with such a feel for the characters (and, by implication, the actors playing them) that it’s difficult not to sympathise with Sergeant Benton being made to give up his 48-hour pass, or be concerned when Captain Yates appears to have been on the receiving end of a V1 doodlebug, and if the supporting characters (with the exception of the serene and philosophical Dalios) don’t really come alive, at least Stuart Hyde isn’t an awkward attempt at comedy which doesn’t come off. The problem with the story in novel form is that there isn’t really enough to the plot to sustain it on the printed page; it’s a little like somebody thinking that ‘The Daemons’ was too fast-paced and inserting another episode to slow it down a bit, or needing to get value for money out of the Newton Institute sets so holding things up for a while before the spectacle of Atlantis- and once there, the Doctor and Jo get locked up, escape, face the Minotaur, get locked up again and escape in time to witness Kronos destroying the city. It’s a slender concept which underlines just how much Doctor Who in 1972 depended on the interaction of the regulars plus a few select guest stars to keep the story going.

And so what starts out as a faithful and affectionate version of a story which Dicks saw through to its television transmission ultimately fades into averageness, not because of the adaptation but because the charisma and interplay of Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado, not to mention the exoticism of Ingrid Pitt’s performance, simply don’t transfer to print. Having said that, the line, "It all happened three thousand five hundred years ago," always strikes me as a perfect Who line; it’s just a shame that the expansive premise of the original story didn’t lead to something which makes for more involving reading.